From Marx… In On the Jewish Question (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/), Marx famously critiques liberal theorists of religious freedom on the grounds that they merely wish to emancipate the state from religion. Assuming—wrongly, it turns out—that the 19th century state, or at least the American state, had indeed been fully emancipated from religion (e.g., there was no official state religion, no specific confessional requirement for the exercise of political rights, etc.), Marx notes that the American people are nevertheless quite religious. This leads him to the observation that “to be politically emancipated from religion is not to be finally and completely emancipated from religion, because political emancipation is not the final and absolute form of human emancipation.” We may be free of religion at the level of the state, but we are not free of it in our everyday life (like most Enlightenment thinkers, Marx thinks of religion as a defect). To be truly free of it, we need to emancipate ourselves from religion, to shift our focus from the state to society itself, to get past the distinction between our public lives and private selves. Not just in matters of religion, as it turns out, but in other areas as well.
President Obama’s recent “compromise (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/10/obama-birth-control-compromise-defuses-religion-issue.html)” over contraception—where religious-based employers like Catholic universities and hospitals are required to provide insurance coverage that includes free birth control but are not required to pay for it, leaving insurers to eat the costs; churches and other explicitly religious institutions will remain exempt from the provision—makes me wonder if we’re not moving in the reverse direction.
98% of sexually active Catholic women (http://www.guttmacher.org/media/nr/2011/04/13/index.html) essentially reject the Church’s position on contraception. In this respect at least, society has emancipated itself from religion. Even so, the state allows its policies to be dictated by the Church elders (http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/15/contraception-con-men/). And judging by the growing Republican discontent (http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/mcconnell-gop-will-push-to-let-any-employer-deny-contraception-coverage.php?m=1)with even this compromise, the state’s capitulation to religion and religious sensibilities could get worse. Keep in mind, as Katha Pollitt points out (http://www.thenation.com/article/165978/obama-stands-bishops-finally), that we are not talking about isolated sects like the Amish, which don’t depend on all manner of tax subsidies and public monies for their operations; these are large-scale institutions that would not exist in their current form were it not for the state’s ongoing support.
…to Mises Speaking of conservatives, the birth control debate recently led Mike Konczal (http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/von-mises-makes-the-libertarian-case-against-free-love-and-implicitly-against-birth-control/) back to Ludwig von Mises (http://mises.org/page/1468/Biography-of-Ludwig-von-Mises-18811973)’ classic 1922 text Socialism (http://mises.org/books/socialism/contents.aspx). Mises was a pioneering economist of the Austrian School, whose political writings have inspired multiple generations of libertarian activists in America and elsewhere. Mike took a special interest in the fourth chapter of Socialism, “The Social Order and the Family,” in which Mises has some retrograde things to say about women and feminism. This led Mike to conclude prematurely that Mises was against birth control, which he wasn’t, but as I make clear (http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/von-mises-makes-the-libertarian-case-against-free-love-and-implicitly-against-birth-control/#comment-22455) in the comments thread (http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/von-mises-makes-the-libertarian-case-against-free-love-and-implicitly-against-birth-control/#comment-22518), Mike’s larger point—that Mises was not in favor of women’s sexual autonomy; nor, for that matter, was he in favor of other kinds of autonomy that would free women from the dominion of their husbands—still stands.
All this back and forth about the text prompted Brian Doherty (http://reason.com/blog/2012/02/13/ludwig-von-mises-approved-of-birth-contr), author of a wonderful history of libertarianism (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1586485725/reasonmagazineA/), to waspishly comment that, well, who really gives a shit what Mises may or may not have thought about women and birth control. Libertarians care about liberty; all the rest is commentary.
Mises does go on to address “natural barriers” that socialists want to overturn, and doubtless some of his own personal opinions about what those natural barriers might be would differ from moderns, liberal or conservative, which is exactly why [Konczal’s] entire implied point doesn’t make any sense to begin with. Those concerns are far more matters of opinion, not political philosophy, and in no sense should bind even those who have sworn fealty to Mises’ general views on economics and liberty. (For example, I’m quite the Misesian in most questions of politics and economics, but can imagine an intelligent conservative argument that the “rationalization of the sexual passions” is in some sense harmed by birth control, though not in the specific procreational sense he is addressing specifically.)
But let’s address the larger point, if there is one, besides that atop all of our heads for even talking about this: That polemical points can rightly be earned laying some judgment, whether real or imagined, of an intellectual founding father or influence on a political movement or tendency on to the backs of its younger followers–either to mock them or to insist that, no, this is really what their intellectual mission is: not to promote liberty, but to work for whatever Ludwig Von Mises liked or didn’t like.
It is interesting, for those interested in intellectual history, that Mises saw free love as part of some larger socialist mission to destroy the family. But for the libertarian the relevant question is, is this voluntary or not, does this infringe on anyone’s life, liberty, or property or not? “Anything that’s peaceful,” baby, as Leonard Read, one of Mises’ great popular disciples in America, wrote.
Thus, there’s a libertarian case to be made against forcing anyone to cover any specific medical care, birth control or whatever, in the insurance deals they make with their clients. But it has nothing to do with whether Ludwig von Mises was comfortable with free love, or birth control, or with catheters, or blood transfusions, or any other specific medical procedure that might or might not become a political controversy when the government tried to force people to sell insurance only on the condition that that insurance cover that procedure or medication’s use.
Set aside the strangeness of someone who’s written—for what were obviously more than antiquarian reasons—one of the best intellectual histories of libertarianism, in which Mises plays a not insignificant role, telling us that intellectual history, and Mises’s role in it, doesn’t much matter.
Also set aside Doherty’s declaration by fiat that Mises’s views on women are just “matters of opinion,” which can be discarded as so much ancient prejudice, rather than genuine “political philosophy.” (This chapter (http://books.google.com/books?id=wl3R1rYDqP8C&pg=PA74&lpg=PA74&dq=%22Libertarianism+takes+to+extremes+some+of+the +basic+tenets+of+classic+liberal+theorists%22&source=bl&ots=UGvfJZkIzz&sig=sQoW25rtWJvnEKvC4xQjy8PlY2k&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ejQ8T4C0NsH30gHrxcS5Dg&ved) on Robert Nozick in Susan Okin’s Justice, Gender, and the Family (http://www.amazon.com/Justice-Gender-Family-Susan-Moller/dp/0465037038/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329345369&sr=1-1) should make any reasonably literate political writer leery of the notion that a libertarian’s views on women are somehow contingent or incidental and separable from their larger worldview. In Mises’s case, it’s doubly important to remember that he saw his chapter on women as one part of his campaign against socialism, an effort in which he styled himself the lonely leader of a small, heterodox band.
Socialism is the watchword and the catchword of our day (http://books.google.com/books?id=3GXi4MQQs3IC&pg=PA25&lpg=PA25&dq=%22Socialism+is+the+watchword+and+the+catchword +of+our+day.+The+socialist+idea+dominates+the+mode rn+spirit.&source=bl&ots=lq_SmUL_9S&sig=6c14WSTciSbCnoAYcWKUdCQf9fE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Cl88T9v_Deb). The socialist idea dominates the modern spirit. The masses prove of it. It expresses the thoughts and feelings of all; it has set its seal upon our time. When history comes to tell our story it will write above the chapter “The Epoch of Socialism.”
Mises did not think his views on women were refractions of the age; he thought they were the dissonant wisdom of someone who had thought long and hard, against the dominant view, about such issues. And given that many socialists were making feminist arguments and gaining ground across Europe—Remember Red Vienna (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Vienna)? It wasn’t all economics (https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Red+Vienna%22+feminism&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=zoo&rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3Aofficial&sclient=psy-ab&q=%2B%22Red+Vienna%22+%2Bfeminism&psj=1&oq=%2B%22), you know—I’m not sure Mises was entirely wrong in his self-understanding.)
Finally set aside, as one commenter on Mike’s thread pointed out (http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/von-mises-makes-the-libertarian-case-against-free-love-and-implicitly-against-birth-control/#comment-22534), the fact that many of Mises’s views persist in later libertarian arguments.
The real reason Mises’s arguments about women are so relevant, it seems to me, is that in the course of making them he reveals something larger about the libertarian worldview: libertarianism is not about liberty at all, or at least not about liberty for everyone. In fact, it’s the opposite.
Here’s Mises describing the socialist program of “free love (http://books.google.com/books?id=3GXi4MQQs3IC&pg=PA101&dq=%22Free+love+is+the+socialists%E2%80%99+radical +solution+for+sexual+problems.+%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=TTk8T7OkB8Hd0QH3iKiqCw&ved=0CEMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Free%20love%20is%20the%20socialists%E2%80%99% 20r)”:
Free love is the socialists’ radical solution for sexual problems. The socialistic society abolishes the economic dependence of woman which results from the fact that woman is dependent on the income of her husband. Man and woman have the same economic rights and the same duties, as far as motherhood does not demand special consideration for the women. Public funds provide for the maintenance and education of the children, which are no longer the affairs of the parents but of society. Thus the relations between the sexes are no longer influenced by social and economic conditions….The family disappears and society is confronted with separate individuals only. Choice in love becomes completely free.
Sounds like a libertarian paradise, right? Society is dissolved into atomistic individuals, obstacles to our free choices are removed, everyone has the same rights and duties. But Mises is not celebrating this ideal; he’s criticizing it. Not because it makes people unfree but because it makes people—specifically, women—free. The problem with liberating women from the constraints of “social and economic conditions” is that…women are liberated from the constraints of social and economic conditions.
Now Doherty will reply, well, that’s just Mises’s view of feminism, who cares, we libertarians stand for freedom. But the underlying logic of Mises’s argument—in which the redistributive state is criticized not for making men and women slaves or equals but for making them free—cannot be so easily contained. It can easily be applied to other realms of social policy—labor unions, universal health care, robust public schools, unemployment benefits, and the like, which the left has always seen (http://www.thenation.com/article/159748/reclaiming-politics-freedom) as the vital prerequisites of universal freedom (http://www.salon.com/2012/02/12/americas_failed_promise_of_equal_opportunity/singleton/)—suggesting that the real target of the libertarian critique may be the proposition that Mises articulates here so well: that all men—not just the rich or the well born—and all women will in fact be liberated from the constraints of their “social and economic conditions.”